Partner Reading
By Jessica Bernal

Partner Reading is a SDAIE strategy that is a motivational fluency-building technique for students who need more support than reading alone provides, but who need less support than a teacher provides. In partner reading, a pair of students take turns reading to each other, Students who are better readers are often paired with students who are less-able readers. The first student reads aloud a section of text while the second student follows along while providing corrective feedback; the roles are then reversed.

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Why do we use Partner Reading?
1. Students show the ability to work productively with a partner
2. Students show the ability to increase accuracy and rate in reading connected text

Main Instructional Focus
  1. Accuracy
  2. Rate
  3. Prosody

How to Pair Students for Partner Reading
  • Assess students' oral reading fluency (ORF)
  • Determine students' instructional reading level
  • Rank order students according to their instructional reading level
  • Pair students in the higher-performing half with students in the lower-performing half

How to use Partner Reading in a classroom
1. Explain to students that reading fluency is the ability to read accurately, quickly, and with good expression, and that fluent readers can pay better attention to the meaning of what they are reading. Students will be practicing their reading fluency with a partner and that their partner will help to monitor their reading, provide help in figuring out hard words, and give general feedback on how they are doing.
2. Before the students work together, model and explain the rules for partner behavior. They will be working together for a few weeks and partners have to work together, be polite and treat each other with respect.
3. Identify the 4 different types of making a mistake while reading with their partner.
  • Saying the wrong word
  • Getting stuck on a word for more than 4 seconds
  • Skipping a word
  • Adding an extra word
4. Have the students pair up with their partners. They will then switch off reading the different sections while correcting each others mistakes. Teacher will be walking around observing the students and pointing out any problems you see.
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Video Demonstration